[bug #64018] [man, mdoc] decide on a common base paragraph indentation

[Thorsten Glaser]

Follow-up Comment #14, bug #64018 (project groff):



> Possibly, _mdoc_(7) page authors knew this and carefully edited the
> ones that did, so that now no one sees them.

Exactly, we do that… I recently also begun rewording things to
avoid hyphenation as well, although only with “french” spacing
(no american double-space after a full stop) since that’s what
I use in my BSD.


>> We figured out that putting \& after punctuation only for stuff like
>> “e.g.\&” (where you don’t want the american double-spacing after),
>> and otherwise before (e.g. “\&.”

That would be “.Dq \&.”, for the sake of completeness.
I also saw “.Dq .\&”, and, for some time, people were
not clear about which one to use, but in discussion
with J�rg, it got clear that the most portable is to
put the \& in front always except “e.g.\&”.

>> or “\&xx” where xx is a request name) works best.
> I assume you mean `\&.xx' in that last example.

No, something like “.Dq \&Li”, that is, where I have a
two-character argument to a parsed macro, so it isn’t
interpreted as callable macro.

This application is disctinct from escaping a leading
dot or apostrophe or an end-of-line dot that’s not a
full stop.

> Interesting.  I did not know `In` was a late-breaking macro

I first saw it in manpages from NetBSD, and OpenBSD did
not have it, nor use it. (I think that before the switch
to mdocml they didn’t change their tmacs much.)

>> We cannot, obviously, have three-letter requests.
> Nope.  Like I said, there's room for `Cq`, `Co`, and `Cc`.

Indeed, I see only Co used grepping through all tmacs:
tmac.doc.old has it as macro (just .tm’ing to say it’s
not an mdoc macro) plus…

| mdoc/README:.\" NS Co register (site) Width Needed for Column offset

… I’m not sure if this is still true, given my grep
did not find any other occurrence? I think this is
old/wrong and needs to be removed.


>> The codebase is the “last” nroff I could use under the Caldera
>> licence, i.e. that was shipped with a BSD covered by these. The

> Is there anyplace these can currently be obtained?

I got them from minnie.tuhs.org; if your CVS skills are still
not too rusty, you can get the subset I imported from MirBSD
anoncvs, too.

And yes, it’s not the later one, it’s the old one where troff
was for that one typesetter(?) machine. I *do* also have a
tape archive of a ditroff predating 1990 which would be in the
PD in the USA but not in the rest of the world, so I cannot
use it (and trying to figure out who even _could_ give a
licence is probably not worth the effort… I think it was
Lucent labs at some point, and someone told me they generally
don’t even have an idea about this), so I had to bite the sour
apple and use the last one from the Caldera drop, which is
pretty much 1970s C code. No prototypes, and every variable
(other than some which are short or char) is of the data type
int or char* which are identical and interchangeable, and they
manually paged part of the -fcommon data area relying on the
in-memory layout to match the one from the source…

> I hope that's a labor of love

Oh, definitely!

(This also allowed me to get rid of C++ from the base system;
groff was the last remaining part, and now I can just install
one from ports on the box where I render the ps→pdf docs.)

As for tbl, IIUC the limitation is because of the limitation
on string names in nroff. I wonder if I can relax the latter
a little in my implementation, having already raised the amount
of things it can handle, just enough to make that page work…

… gah, not tonight. No nerdsnipey for me.



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